We Don’t Need Two Wall Street Parties

It’s tough to be a “Third Way” corporatist in today’s Democratic Party. Sure, the numerically small faction of Wall Street and Beltway Democrats has long enjoyed an outsized influence on public policy, but all the hedge fund money in the world can’t change the fact that the party is in the midst of a dramatic reorientation toward a new progressive populism. And it turns out that populism is popular! Voters across the country are increasingly concerned about the pressing issues of income inequality and economic security, and elected Democrats have responded with a renewed focus on solutions for working Americans.

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So what’s a group that exists—as far as I can tell—solely to defend the narrow interests of Wall Street Democrats, to do?

Apparently, the answer is to lash out at me and others who simply want to see the Democratic Party work for Democratic values. Third Way’s Matt Bennett and Jim Kessler took to this site last week to charge me with the apparent sin of celebrating the party’s current Senate majority, one that is finally starting to function thanks to the absence of corrosive elements like Zell Miller and Joe Lieberman, who tied the Democratic caucus in knots just 10 years ago.

Bennett and Kessler’s argument seems to be that I, and by extension the new populist majority of the Democratic Party, am somehow particularly intolerant of certain flavors of Democrats—that we’re closing up the “big tent” and limiting the party’s national appeal. That’s pretty rich coming from a group whose raison d’etre seems to be to hammer progressive candidates and policies.

Indeed, it was September 2012, just months before election day, when Third Way’s Bennett claimed that Elizabeth Warren was “catastrophically antibusiness” and that her economic populism was “not a winning strategy.” It would make sense for Third Way to prefer Sen. Scott Brown over Warren, given that 27 of the organization’s 29 board members are current or former CEOs, corporate lawyers or principals at financial service institutions.But you don’t get to whine about big tents after undermining Democratic candidates in the heat of an election.

Still, let’s look at the question of whether our populist approach is compromising the party’s ability to win across the country. Bennett and Kessler lament that seven of the 10 right-wing Democrats that I celebrated for no longer being in the Senate were replaced by Republicans—but what was then a Democratic two-seat minority is now a Democratic 10-seat majority. If you’re genuinely a Democrat, you have to admit that a 55-seat caucus reinforced with strong progressive voices is objectively preferable to a 49-seat caucus packed with corporatist Democrats who voted for the disastrous Iraq war and George W. Bush’s budget-busting tax cuts. If you’re genuinely a Democrat.

Furthermore, the notion that Daily Kos and I are intolerant toward moderate Democrats just doesn’t square with the facts. We’ve raised millions of dollars and generated on-the-ground activism for moderate Democratic candidates such as Jon Tester in Montana, Jim Webb in Virginia, Mark Begich in Alaska, Jack Conway in Kentucky and Jim Martin in Georgia. No liberal or progressive would categorize a single one of those candidates as anything other than moderate, yet our community backed them with significant financial resources. The Senate races in Kentucky and Georgia will be getting plenty of love this year despite featuring moderate Democrats on the ballot. We’ve backed similar moderates at the House and state level for more than a decade